Following lots of useful discussion and evaluation of the available DVCSs
out there, the GHC team have made a decision: we're going to switch to git.
It came down to two things: the degree of support available, and
flexibility of the tools (git is much happier to let you modify the history
than Mercurial). Speed ruled out bzr, and Windows support is less of an
issue: git appears to work reasonably well on Windows these days.
So we need a plan for switching. We aim to make the switch shortly before
branching the repository for 6.10, which would mean we need to make the
switch early September, in around 5 weeks time.
Before then, the goal is to get the infrastructure to the point where we
can switch with minimum fuss. We already have an up-to-date git mirror
thanks to Thomas Schilling:
git clone http://darcs.haskell.org/ghc.git
(notice how fast that is :-)
darcs-all will be able to work with either the git repository or the darcs
repository (Max Bolingbroke is working on this, I believe). We can switch
the automatic builds over to git as soon as darcs-all is working, and as
long as the git mirror is kept up to date (Thomas: is the mirror being
automatically updated now?).
I'd urge people to try out the git mirror and let us know how you get on.
We'll also work on updating the build documentation on the wiki and
creating a page of getting-started info on using git.
Cheers,
Simon